What the GRA reform fiasco has revealed about safeguarding [edited by MNHQ at OP's request].

[FloralBunting]

So, the Times is reporting that the GRA reforms are dead. Time will tell, of course, but as we often analyse and examine beyond appearances in FWR, it occurs to me that this whole affair has brought to light many more surprising and worrying things than we realized.

Obviously, the rampant glee with which so many purportedly progressive men have let their repressed sexism and contempt for women flow freely has been a pretty unpleasant revelation, but I think there is something more surprising than that.

In all the discussions here and elsewhere in the last few years, the women here have been able to pinpoint that the hinge to all possible damage is a total disregard for Safeguarding frameworks.

Time and again, people have appeared on FWR to promote Self ID, gender identity as paramount over material reality, and all the attendant beliefs, and each of them has repeatedly demonstrated a complete absence of safeguarding knowledge.

What is most concerning about that is that some of them say they have had safeguarding training, or even that they work with vulnerable children and others.

It seems to me that, going forward, this egregious lip service - where a vital safety framework has been revealed to be smoke and mirrors among a large proportion of people who are tasked with implementing it - must be addressed.

I propose a concerted focus on actual Safeguarding education and implementation. Time and again, people, some of them in positions of power, some not, have illustrated that safeguarding principles are not at all well understood, let alone adequately implemented.

I'm starting this thread because I think this is a vitally important component of a society that looks after the vulnerable, because not only is there widespread ignorance about safeguarding, but some have very clearly been determined to undermine and remove it entirely, and I think that is something we should stop.

I'm encouraging us all to continue to ask questions, and I think it would be great to organize something lasting and effective, in terms of safeguarding education, so that the hard work put in over these last few years, and the consequences many of us have faced, actually lead in to something that will benefit our society, and genuinely make life better for women, children, and anyone who is vulnerable.

Yes, entirely agree. Is it worth considering an NGO type of organisation to put pressure on generally to consider safeguarding?

I know very little about safeguarding, and what little I know I've learned on this board. I think a grounding and awareness of safeguarding should be common knowledge, all parents and in fact all adults should have an awareness of it. It's relevant to so many things - groups, institutions, govt itself.

And from what I can tell is that good safeguarding requires to be challenged, regularly, which tends to not happen from within a group/institution. Frameworks to reciprocate, test, question and feedback should be built in - maybe could be shared by partnerships?

I may be havering - just thinking out loud, really.

There are definatley issues with safeguarding - although i am no expert. There is still a 'but thats just jimmy' attitude to specific individuals doing things that other people wouldnt get to do. I help at a swim club and we had to remove a 'just jimmy' from volunteering at the club. However, he helps at another club who have said 'they found no evidence of wrong doing' when we contacted them to share our concerns, as did the ASA who let him help at county events. The thing is we have no evidence of 'wrong doing' but we do have evidence that the he doesnt follow the rules that are put in place for safeguarding. Its like the dont apply to him as he is well liked and old and its just jimmy. We decided that if you dont follow the rules you dont get to coach/help - even if their is no provable sexual or malicious motivation behind the individual not follwing the rules. But for some reason the other club and the ASA have said its not enough to just not follow the rules you also have to prove they are not following the rules with malicious intent.
I'm sure thats not how its supposed to work?

Excellent news! -- I hadn't read the Times article, and of course nothing on the Guardian news site (why am I still disappointed?). So I found out here, from Mumsnet.

I'll be glad if the government really does drop its ridiculous plans for self-ID, and doesn't backslide under a renewed onslaught from the mouthy men.

But I'm no longer satisfied with the existing law. Even at present, all a man needs to become legally a woman is a note from an obliging doctor and two years supposedly living in the new gender. Then he can legally stroll into any 'safe space' for women or children. Now that we've all woken up to the abuse that's going on and all the more since so many organisations have already implemented self-ID in anticipation of the law being weakened I want to see the 2004 law tightened up.

Looks as if safeguarding will have to be the next big campaign. Well done, all who are already working on it and have brought it into the light.

Brilliant informative posts, Floral and Michelle, thanks.

Child safeguarding in this country is meant to work as ScrimshawTheSecond describes. We have an overarching hierarchy of legislation - the Children Act plus additional legislation. The specific legislation for health, education, social care etc translates into all workplaces having their own finely tuned safeguarding policies.

However - in recent years trans lobby groups have been allowed to devise "trans" guidelines for schools, sporting bodies, organisations that work with children. These guidelines consistently undermine safeguarding. They advocate parental alienation (positioning parents as unsupportive), advocate keeping a child's confidentiality, promote myths such as born in the wrong body and openly groom children in believing that self harming practices (breast binders, puberty blocking drugs, body modification surgery) are not only acceptable but desirable for children. The adults surrounding them have already been groomed into believing that any concerns about this are transphobic - thus stopping any safeguarding concerns before they can be voiced. And all this is before we add in the impact of those adults working to "queer the curriculum" and impose a porn soaked ideology on children in schools.

This has happened in plain sight and all of our organisations, teacher unions, Ofsted, the NHS, social care are all so lacking in moral courage and integrity that they dare not challenge the evident abuse - even when it is laid out for them in the courts by judges like Mr Justice Hayden in the case of child J:

www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2016/2430.html

It's a universal dereliction of duty by responsible adults. It is overdue that the government takes a lead and stops the evident undermining of safeguarding.

its not enough to just not follow the rules, you also have to prove they are not following the rules with malicious intent. I'm sure thats not how its supposed to work?

I'm with you there, Grasspigeon. It doesn't make sense.

If I drive at twice the speed limit and kill someone, is that OK because I didn't have malicious intent? Or if I take kids swimming without following the rules, and they drown, is that OK? Sounds like an excuse for not having the guts to challenge anyone breaking the rules.

Languishing that judgement makes seriously thought provoking reading.

What about a safeguarding regulator? Like an OfCom or an Ofsted? I mean, obviously there is no silver bullet, and the cultural change is the aim, and every bureaucratic intervention is susceptible to a tick box mentality, but, given the state of misinformation flowing around from organisations with backing, like Stonewall, it would be a solid thing to have a specific authority backing these things up.

To be honest, one of the first things the tories did in 2010 was scrap Every Child Matters, (which i always thought was because they disagreed with the sentiment) which was intended as a landmark safeguarding strategy iirc, so they basically paved the way for this situation.

There have been a number of government ordered white papers which can be found online on why, effectively, Baby P was a repeat of Victoria Climbe and so was Daniel Pelka, with much the same basic underlying failures, and why the changes in safeguarding haven't had enough effect on the ground.

They mostly outline the issues I listed above. Serious case reviews can be found online, and also repeatedly come back to the same key issues. Every Child Matters has received the same notice of not endorsed by the Conservatives, but the Code of Practice and most guidance continues to follow the basic principles of safeguarding set out in it. It's less what's happening at the top than dealing with coal face issues at the bottom.

Yes, a safeguarding regulator sounds sensible. But that itself would need to be very rigorously and regularly checked, as it'd become a target for anyone seeking to undermine safeguarding.

I wonder if a more kind of broad-based approach is better? If you have one high-up organisation that falls or is infiltrated, that could have devastating consequences. So I wonder if a more devolved/flatter structure, with everybody having the same protected powers to question/check might work more healthily?

I will mentioned hearing it explained once at a meeting that there are dozens of Baby Ps and Victorias and Daniels, these cases happen all the time, those cases were just ones that escaped into the press and caused the public outrage that led to government interest.

At a local authority level much effort is made to prevent this happening and a case escaping as these ones did into public knowledge is regarded as a failure.

Ah, cross posted, Michelle. That sounds like a bottom-up kind of approach is necessary or more effective?

I'm a bit scunnered, actually, that there isn't a safeguarding body, per se? Is there no specific govt department set up to do this?

Oh, god. That's a very sickening thought.

I couldn't agree more, FloralBunting.

Michelleoftheresistance
That judgement was in 2016 - and yes - it is thought provoking because the situation in terms of regulatory capture is now far worse.
ScimshawTheSecond
I believe that some referrals about the awful trans guidance that undermines safeguarding have been made to the The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). I have not heard of any response from them.

And that's the closest thing to a safeguarding body that we have?

It's applies to so many more areas than CSA.

I don't trust MP's to manage a safeguarding watchdog.
Of the top of my head I can think of 2 MP's who have demonstrated they don't understand the legislation they are campaigning to change, they can't have read it since they misquote it, and the changes they propose remove protection for a group of vulnerable people.

And from what I can tell is that good safeguarding requires to be challenged, regularly, which tends to not happen from within a group/institution

IMO the trouble is that the general public doesn't appreciate the extent to which the current approach to trans children (and self-ID, which is often what's occurring in practice) threatens safeguarding. So when there is, for example, a trans teen in a youth group on a trip, parents assume that the very experienced and well-trained youth workers in loco parentis will keep their DC safe. They don't realise that the extensive training the youth workers have received was conceived by Stonewall and Mermaids and that it doesn't actually have any basis in safeguarding at all. Because who would believe that this would be allowed to happen? It sounds mad.

Conversely, the parents who are aware of the issue are highly likely to also understand the consequences of speaking out against the status quo. People's lives and careers have been torn to shreds by speaking out and while I'm very grateful that they were brave enough to do so, not all of us feel able to take a stand like that.

The mantra of 'trans children don't present a safeguarding issue' accompanied by an eye roll is almost as pervasive as the TWAW manta. I've known people to almost laugh at the stupidity of people asking about safeguarding in the context of trans children. This mantra uses emotional manipulation to present the objection from the trans child's perspective rather than acknowledging that it's the policy/practice that's being questioned, not the excluded, innocent child.

So parents are made to feel uninformed and bigoted by even asking about safeguarding in relation to trans-inclusion. Especially when it's an 'expert' on trans talking to your average person on the street, purporting to have examined safeguarding from all angles (with a further eye roll).

Excellent thread op. Safeguarding is everywhere, in that in my role I have safeguarding training even though my job doesn't involve contact with the public in any way, but nowhere in that it is lip service. We need to go back to when this stuff was important.

I’m still amazed that Girl Guides have welcomed trans inclusion.......they have been begged to reconsider but refuse. They are blatantly not safeguarding the girls in their care.

I agree there pitfalls to central regulating bodies, for sure. I just think that long term we probably need a shake up at significant authority level. But granted, that's not really within reach right now, so energies are definitely better spent elsewhere.

And, as we've said, this really needs to be a much broader base.

Yes, that's the trouble, isn't it. Nobody can or should be above being questioned, checked, etc.

What if there were a loose, unaffiliated, unofficial body that existed only to provoke safeguarding enquiries? To ask questions, raise issues, poke holes in potential safeguarding weak spots? Does that risk vigilante-ism?

I'm a parent of young children. Can anyone recommend a good safeguarding 101 source? Someone mentioned Lisa Muggeridge videos - would that be the best place to start? Many thanks

I wonder how long it will be before we get "Well, I didn't mean that, obviously ". Trouble with posting nonsense online for a politician is that people remember who you are and what you said.

Tootsweets23
The NSPCC have some good online resources. BUT - and it's a major BUT - they have also been regulatory captured and fail to challenge the undermining of safeguarding by trans lobby groups. Awful in the country's leading safeguarding charity. Nevertheless I can't think of a good alternative:

www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/